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I stopped in at the Vero Beach Book Center on Friday and they had a terrific display of the book in the front of the store, and they asked me to sign the copies they had left. Cynthia, their publicity person (yes, an independent bookstore with a devoted publicity person - they do a lot of events) snapped this pic:

Science Left Behind is #2 on Amazon for books on environmental policy. That's cool and all, but what is really cool is that it is right behind Jared Diamond. If you have to get beat, that is the guy you want to get beat by:

I think it needs to last longer than a day - but it is #900 overall on Amazon. Factoring out Harry Potter and all that fiction stuff plus the miracle vegetable of the week diet books and political hoopie, being in the top 1K as a non-fiction science book feels pretty good.

However, if even the Poughkeepsie Times puts me on a bestseller list, it is going in my bio.

Well, I hope Santa is good to those people. I finally got a personal attack on Twitter, some hard-left crackpot who will only believe that the religious and Republicans can have anti-science positions, and wrote "
@hankcampbell and anyone who would read, write, or take seriously "Science Left Behind" is a shallow non-thinker" - which to me felt personal, even if slightly subliterate. Alex gets the best stuff because he did all of the TV. He got called a 'sniveling little demon in an Amazon book review - by someone who never bought the book - 5 minutes after being on C-SPAN.

A pretty hilarious deconstruction of Alex's Fox News interview by Cenk Uygur at The Young Turks. Of course, how many books did being on that guy's YouTube video sell, versus something like Fox News?

Okay, I don't know. I am told media appearances don't sell a ton of books anyway so it's hard to say what value it has. If being on Fox and MSNBC sold no books, I can't imagine a YouTube video did either. But it was pretty funny.

I was on Chicaco's NPR station, 91.5, with host Rick Kogan and the Afternoon Shift, along with with Dr. Francesca Grifo, Director of Scientific Integrity for the Union of Concerned Scientists advocacy group:

Rick Kogan: Science Left Behind is "vastly more entertaining than one might imagine, from a book about science."

"Science, Bitches: Why Your Hippie Friends Are Filled with Wrong" is a fun title for a review from a Portland paper: "Anti-scientism is everywhere, and acknowledging that much of it comes from our own political tribe is a hard and inconvenient truth.”

It's not all balloons and ponies, but even the criticisms are funny: "Some of the passages are so aggressively axe-grindy that Christopher Hitchens' drunken ghost very well could have penned them."

December 8th I was with Alex in Dallas, Texas on The Blaze network. Here is the first segment:

"I'll tell you why I love this book so much. It doesn't read like some right wing attack book" ... which is the point and no one could have said it beter. The data is there, we don't need to surround it with red meat. It may not change any opinions but even in a month we have seen a cultural shift regarding three of the issues in the book. And more will happen.

I was on the morning television show called "Fox&Friends" last Friday. It is a live show and primarily for east coast viewers so that meant getting out of bed at 2 AM and being driven to a studio and being in a chair by 3:45AM my time.

Yikes. I had terrible lighting anyway, and the earpiece kept falling out but I got to debunk 3 feel-good fallacies in 4 minutes, which is always nice.

My proudest moment is that I got to say something so completely accurate yet so outrageous the anchor had to defend environmentalists.